homework#2

The time I formally study the English as a second language was in high school. Although I began to study English in primary school, the English I was taught was super low in primary school. During the time when I truly study English in high school I did not have lots of ideas of what is literacy, this word was unfamiliar and little used. Sometime I even supposed the literacy was English writing, and naively consider what I wrote was also can be called literacy. However, when I firstly read the famous tragic literacy "Hamlet" written by Shakespeare, I found how naïve I was before. And after that, I consider literacy as art.

I still remember that class when I first saw the copies of "Hamlet". When my English teacher spread the copies of "Hamlet" and said "this is reading homework and you should read carefully, because it is literacy, not just reading." I just thought this was a very common reading material just as lots of paper he let us read before because of the misunderstanding of literacy.  However, when I try to read, I found it was so hard to fully understand the meanings of sentences in only first paragraph. The words Shakespeare used are so hard to identify and know. Some words I cannot even find in my electronic dictionary which covered six kinds of dictionaries in it. (I got the answer when I know the difference of old and modern English). The worse thing was that when you confidently know meanings of all the words in some sentence you still could not understand the real meaning the author wants to represent in such sentence. Since this is not a simple article, it is a drama. I got a feeling of frustration. So I asked to teacher about how I can understand the meaning of paper. Teacher's suggestion was to watch the video of Hamlet when you read the paper. As I followed the teacher's suggestion, I find I can understand more and more about words and sentence. Finally I got the answer why I cannot understand at first, the sentences actually provide are not sentences, they provide images that you can image by yourself throughout the sentences. I suddenly realize it is literacy. literacy is more like art than language or writing. It can provide you with images like you are watching pictures or movies.